This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
An odu entry records a specific, named figure within the Ifa divination corpus, the sixteen principal odu and their many derived combinations, recorded here for its documented structural place within the system, its name and its position in the traditional ordering, rather than for the verses themselves, which belong to a living, initiated priesthood and are not reproduced here. Wande Abimbola's scholarly account of the Ifa literary corpus describes the odu as a vast, structured body of oral literature transmitted through trained diviners, the babalawo, rather than a fixed written text available outside that transmission.
An entry records an odu's documented name, its structural position among the sixteen principal figures or their derived combinations, and what published, non restricted scholarship records about its general character, since a figure's structural place in the system, an elder figure or one of its many derived combinations, is itself a documented, checkable fact distinct from the verses associated with it.
Consistent with how this atlas treats any tradition's closed or restricted material, an odu entry describes a figure's documented structure and its place within Ifa divination from published scholarship, never reproducing the verses themselves, since description and reproduction are different acts.